learned the art of carking their selfnesses into their computers, (it was also said that the Fostora women, disdaining the transfer of human mind into "machine," had ventured forth in long ships until they came to the planet they called Lechoix. Whereupon they founded the oldest of the matriarchies. The historian Burgos Harsha, however, gives a different explanation of their origin. He holds that Lechoix was colonized by a renegade deep ship full of nubile girls bound for the sun domes on Heaven's Gate. Who really knows?)
After a long time, I passed into that portion of the fallaways little touched by either the second or third waves of the Swarming. Here were planets so old - Freeport and New Earth and Kaarta among others - that they had been peopled long before man had come to formulate the laws of civilization. Here were woman and men who had carked their DNA, tampered with their chromosomes and changed their flesh in many horrible ways to fit their new habitats as a drillworm fits the hole it chews into a living skull.
Darrein Luz was a yellow star, beyond which lay others for which there existed no known mappings. It was my task, as a pilot, to discover new mappings, to set up the isomorphisms and prove my theorems, that or die. And though as a journeyman I had made such mappings of the manifold near our city's little sun, I had never made so many nor journeyed so far.
At first it was easy. With zazen I emptied my mind of everything except mathematical thoughts. I was alert and open to the manifold's undulations and sudden deformations. Various spaces folded and re-folded around me. I was afraid as I entered a torison space, but I found a little theorem that let me make sense of the writhing tunnels threatening to devour me. "The faithful mathematician must use his will to achieve insight from pattern" - so the cantors say. My will was strong at first, and with each successful mapping I made, it grew stronger still. Sixty-eight stars beyond Darrein Luz, I was so puffed-up with pride I plunged into what I thought would be a rather simple thickspace.
It was nothing of the sort. The point-sources were indeed stived as densely as lice on the head of a harijan, but I could find no mappings to the point-exits in the nebula which lay before me, the nebula called the Solid State Entity. I wondered why. It seemed beyond all chance that there should be no mappings. Because I could go no further, I fell out into realspace above a ringed planet. I felt alone and lost, and so I named the faint, yellow star nearest the thickspace "Perdido Luz." I vowed I would master the thickspace even if it took me forty days of realtime.
I do not know how long I spent, intime, scurfing the windows of the thickspace. Certainly it was much longer than forty days. It was truly a bizarre thickspace, riddled with too many zero-points and embedded spaces. Often I had trouble fixing points; often I tunneled from one dark window to another only to find the windows fixed in a closed ring. The usual rules of interfenestration seemed not to hold. I must have mapped sixty-four thousand point-sources, and not one of them could I prove to be simply connected with any other among the stars of the Entity. Once, I laughed so hard my jaws almost popped out of joint; then in despair I bit my lip until I tasted the hot salt of blood. The very existence of this impossible thickspace mocked my faith in the trueness of the Great Theorem. I was almost certain that
no
mapping from Perdido Luz to the Entity could be found. I was ready to give up when I stumbled upon a beautiful, discrete set of point-sources, all of which connected to a single white star in the outer envelope of the Entity. I had only to make the mapping, open a window, and I would be the first pilot in five hundred years to dare the fickle, whirlpool spaces of a living nebula.
I made the mapping and fell out around the star. So, I thought,
this
is the group of stars
After a long time, I passed into that portion of the fallaways little touched by either the second or third waves of the Swarming. Here were planets so old - Freeport and New Earth and Kaarta among others - that they had been peopled long before man had come to formulate the laws of civilization. Here were woman and men who had carked their DNA, tampered with their chromosomes and changed their flesh in many horrible ways to fit their new habitats as a drillworm fits the hole it chews into a living skull.
Darrein Luz was a yellow star, beyond which lay others for which there existed no known mappings. It was my task, as a pilot, to discover new mappings, to set up the isomorphisms and prove my theorems, that or die. And though as a journeyman I had made such mappings of the manifold near our city's little sun, I had never made so many nor journeyed so far.
At first it was easy. With zazen I emptied my mind of everything except mathematical thoughts. I was alert and open to the manifold's undulations and sudden deformations. Various spaces folded and re-folded around me. I was afraid as I entered a torison space, but I found a little theorem that let me make sense of the writhing tunnels threatening to devour me. "The faithful mathematician must use his will to achieve insight from pattern" - so the cantors say. My will was strong at first, and with each successful mapping I made, it grew stronger still. Sixty-eight stars beyond Darrein Luz, I was so puffed-up with pride I plunged into what I thought would be a rather simple thickspace.
It was nothing of the sort. The point-sources were indeed stived as densely as lice on the head of a harijan, but I could find no mappings to the point-exits in the nebula which lay before me, the nebula called the Solid State Entity. I wondered why. It seemed beyond all chance that there should be no mappings. Because I could go no further, I fell out into realspace above a ringed planet. I felt alone and lost, and so I named the faint, yellow star nearest the thickspace "Perdido Luz." I vowed I would master the thickspace even if it took me forty days of realtime.
I do not know how long I spent, intime, scurfing the windows of the thickspace. Certainly it was much longer than forty days. It was truly a bizarre thickspace, riddled with too many zero-points and embedded spaces. Often I had trouble fixing points; often I tunneled from one dark window to another only to find the windows fixed in a closed ring. The usual rules of interfenestration seemed not to hold. I must have mapped sixty-four thousand point-sources, and not one of them could I prove to be simply connected with any other among the stars of the Entity. Once, I laughed so hard my jaws almost popped out of joint; then in despair I bit my lip until I tasted the hot salt of blood. The very existence of this impossible thickspace mocked my faith in the trueness of the Great Theorem. I was almost certain that
no
mapping from Perdido Luz to the Entity could be found. I was ready to give up when I stumbled upon a beautiful, discrete set of point-sources, all of which connected to a single white star in the outer envelope of the Entity. I had only to make the mapping, open a window, and I would be the first pilot in five hundred years to dare the fickle, whirlpool spaces of a living nebula.
I made the mapping and fell out around the star. So, I thought,
this
is the group of stars
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